Kogami didn't know how much time had gone by. He knew he was in the hospital, and he knew this wasn't the first time he'd been awake. He thought he was probably in Tokyo, although he had no way to be certain.
Kogami didn't like hospitals. The light was too bright, the noises were too loud. There were too many people who wanted to touch him. The first time he'd been awake, or at least the first time he remembered, he'd been on so many drugs that he hadn't even remembered that he'd been hurt. He'd tried to get out of bed. A bunch of alarms had gone off, and he'd been wrestled back down and promptly gone back to sleep. The time after that, he was still on a lot of drugs, although apparently not as many because his side had hurt so badly he'd barely even found it in himself to keep breathing.
He was pretty sure this had been the first time he'd woken up that he'd been cognizant enough to remember why he was in the hospital. And that wasn't to say he was doing well. He was dizzy and headachy and nauseous from the pain and the cocktail of drugs he'd been given. He'd spent pretty much the entirety of the time he'd been awake blinking up at the ceiling, because he lacked the strength to move. But he could think at least, and that was the most important thing.
He remembered being sent to EENA. He remembered starting the riots, trying to escape. He remembered the first injury, and the second one. He remembered stuffing himself into a crate and being shipped back to Japan.
And most of all, he remembered Ginoza's voice in his ear. Without Ginoza, he never would have made it back.
He vaguely remembered looking for Ginoza, one of the previous times he'd woken up. Ginoza hadn't been there, of course. Everything after Kogami had been pulled out of the crate was kind of fuzzy, but Kogami was pretty sure that Ginoza had been arrested. Kogami vaguely remembered fighting, and also being drugged, and he thought those things had started because he had felt Ginoza being pulled away from him.
Kogami thought it had been a few days since then, based on how much better he felt. It was hard to be sure though.
The thought of Ginoza alone, arrested while Kogami lay here uselessly in a hospital made his throat close up. Kogami could feel the senseless drug-induced panic rising like a tide inside him, and he closed his eyes and tried to fight it back. He couldn't help Ginoza if he was sedated again. He would just lose more time, and Ginoza would be in jail for longer.
After a few deep breaths, which did their job largely by putting Kogami through so much pain that the anxiety fell away in the face of it, Kogami opened his eyes again and shifted experimentally. He hurt, all over, but he thought that he could probably sit up. His injured arm was bandaged, immobilized in a sling, and felt stiff and painful. Kogami didn't want to probe his side too deeply, but while painful, it felt a good deal better than it had in EENA. Now, he was fairly sure that moving would only result in pain, not his insides slipping out onto the outside.
Kogami craned his neck down, managing to lift his left arm slightly. IVs snaked into his hand and arm, wrapping enough cords around him that it was hard to maneuver even his uninjured arm.
Kogami frowned at the IV lines, shaking his head to clear it as much as he could. It didn't work, just left him feeling dizzy as well as just as foggy as before. At least one of the lines was probably feeding him enough painkillers that he was barely cognizant, and he wouldn't be surprised if there was some other form of mood regulator intended to keep him docile.
He couldn't have that. Kogami traced the IV lines to the stand beside his bed and squinted until he could read enough of the bag to tell what each of them was.
The saline could stay in. Kogami was still recovering from a good deal of blood loss, and he felt weak and hollow enough to recognize that the saline was still necessary.
There were painkillers, however, and a more aggressive mood relaxant than Kogami had expected. He supposed that explained why he hadn't woken up and immediately begun screaming for Ginoza again, and why he felt vaguely annoyed by his discovery rather than furious and violated.
Kogami flexed the fingers of his right hand, discovered that he could move them, albeit clumsily, and began worming his way out of the sling. Even that little physical activity left him dizzy, and as he pulled his arm free he had to take a minute to close his eyes and regain his equilibrium.
His shoulder hurt where they'd presumably stitched up the bullet wound, but Kogami could tell just from the initial movement that he'd been right, and the bullet hadn't broken anything.
Small favors. Kogami flexed his right hand again, then reached over and yanked out the unnecessary lines he'd identified.
A few alarms immediately started beeping. This wasn't the first time he'd been stuck in a hospital and wanted to remove things without getting the attention of any medical personnel, so he knew where to go to quiet the alarms. He couldn't turn them completely off. But he thought he'd bought himself at least a couple of minutes - since he was a latent criminal that wasn't actively dying, he doubted he was the highest priority patient here.
He thought about using his few minutes of time to escape. He knew if he wanted to get Ginoza out of trouble he was going to need to threaten someone much higher up the chain of command, and to do that, he was going to need to get himself an audience with them. But escaping seemed like a bit too much to ask his tired body for, especially now that he'd removed his access to painkillers.
He looked down, and realized that since he'd been back, they'd already locked a new watch onto him. At first, Kogami's heart sank. Escaping was even more out of the picture now - they would surely be able to track his location through the watch.
But then, Kogami smiled. Assuming this watch was just like the one they'd removed before sending him off to EENA, it could do a lot more than track his location. He should be able to send messages, and more importantly, he could record.
Kogami swallowed a few times and carefully licked his lips. He felt horribly dry. Even the saline, which he knew had probably been being steadily replaced for days, didn't seem to have made a dent in that. He would have killed for a glass of water, but he doubted he was allowed to take anything by mouth yet.
Once he was as ready as he thought he would ever be, he opened up his watch. It was difficult with his right arm stiff and swaddled in bandages, but he managed. He immediately started recording - he wasn't sure how long he would have before someone noticed what he was doing, and he really didn't want to be interrupted.
In EENA, Kogami had had a lot of big plans for how he was going to blackmail SYBIL into letting Ginoza go. They'd mostly just been fantasies - he didn't know how to hack, so he couldn't threaten to send a message out to every citizen in Japan, for example. But as it was, Kogami was injured and exhausted and on so many drugs he could hardly think straight. It was about all he could do to record a video that outlined his deal with SYBIL and his role in the recent unrest in EENA. He was pretty sure he'd ended up rambling, and he wasn't completely positive he'd actually ended up getting his point across. But he didn't think he could do better - he just had to hope he was somehow understandable.
When he was done, he turned off the recording and saved the file with the highest level of encryption he had access to. That wouldn't really help, since they could just knock him out and take the watch off his unresisting wrist, but he had something else in mind. He might not be able to get a message out to every Japanese citizen, but he knew someone who could.
Kogami opened up a secure channel on his watch, knowing that once again, he didn't have the access to make the communication perfectly safe. Luckily, by the time the message got to the other end, it would be. Shion was the best analyst he knew, and despite the way he'd left things the first time around, she would still help him out when he needed it.
He briefly outlined the situation, including his encrypted video with a request that she wait to hear back from him for seven days before releasing the recording. He kept his explanation about the deal concise, not because he was worried about revealing classified information, but because he was sure she already knew it. She probably knew more than Kogami did.
Kogami waited a few minutes, bouncing back and forth between intense pain and the drag of sleep. Eventually, Shion responded with a thumbs up, and a message telling him to "go get 'em, Shinya."
Kogami hoped "they" would allow themselves to be got, rather than choosing the option of quietly executing him and burning all of Shion's files, but it was pretty much the only play he had left. Besides, he didn't want to leave Ginoza in jail a second longer than he had to. Kogami had seen the inside of both the rehab facility and the deeper, higher security area reserved for real criminals as opposed to latent ones. He didn't want Ginoza to be in either.
Kogami included a copy of his recording in the next message, too, mostly just to be an asshole. He sent it to the highest level PSB employee he could find contact information for, with the subject line "I'd like to make a deal."
Now, all he could do was wait for them to take the bait.
Ginoza hurried down the hospital corridor, occasionally casting anxious glances behind him. He still wasn't convinced that he wouldn't be pursued.
After he'd helped Kogami off the airplane, he'd been taken pretty much straight to a cell, where he'd sat. And sat, and sat some more. No one had talked to him, and after what Ginoza thought may have been something like a week, he was sure that no one was going to.
It had taken another three days for grim-faced men to show up at his cell door. One of them, Ginoza recognized as Kogami's handler. One of the other men, who quickly introduced himself as Ginoza's new case manager, explained that he would be attending a "disciplinary hearing" in the coming weeks, and that he personally expected that to balloon out into several "disciplinary hearings" that could stretch on a couple of months.
Ginoza had been pretty sure that in this case, "disciplinary hearing" was code for "criminal trial." If he was unlucky, it might even be code for the sort of performative trial that meant Ginoza's verdict had already been decided, and he would be spending a long time in jail.
Not that a real trial would exactly help matters either. It wasn't as if Ginoza was innocent.
He'd genuinely believed they were planning to explain the situation to him and then leave him there, all the way up until he'd watched them open the door and step aside. It was only then that he realized that all may not be as it seemed. After a few questions, he determined that the disciplinary hearings actually…were disciplinary hearings. For some unknown reason, the criminal charges against him had been dropped.
Immediately, Ginoza suspected Kogami. He was shocked Kogami was well enough to do…much of anything, considering how badly injured he had been the last time Ginoza had seen him. But Ginoza simply couldn't think of any other way he could have gotten out of the trouble he was in. If he was free now, at least nominally so, he was sure that Kogami must have something to do with it.
This was the first time Ginoza had been allowed to see Kogami. He was still in the hospital, which again seemed to lend weight to the idea that Kogami couldn't have anything to do with this. But in Ginoza's experience, Kogami was able to pull off just about anything he tried to, and in any state of injury too.
Ginoza was glad he was finally getting the chance to talk to Kogami and figure out what the hell had happened, but he was more glad that he was finally getting the chance to see Kogami at all. He was sure that someone would have come and told him if Kogami had died or something, but…still. Kogami had been in rough shape. It was nice to be sure.
When Ginoza entered Kogami's hospital room (a private room, to Ginoza's surprise, they must really want to keep him away from other patients), he hadn't been exactly sure what to expect. He'd barely had a chance to look over Kogami's wounds before they'd been yanked away from each other, and he wasn't sure how much of the problem could be chalked up to dehydration, exhaustion, and exposure. He would have believed Kogami had had enough time to nearly completely recover, but he also wouldn't have been surprised to open the door and find a Kogami that looked to him to be near death.
The reality was somewhere in the middle. When Ginoza walked into Kogami's room, Kogami was sitting up in bed, reading. He was hooked up to a lot of beeping machines that Ginoza didn't understand, and he looked pale. His right arm was in a sling, covered with bandages, and Ginoza was sure there were more that he couldn't see. He looked thin, and a little hollow still, but his hair had been washed, the blood scrubbed away, and he looked a hell of a lot better than he had the last time Ginoza had seen him.
Ginoza stepped forward, meaning to call out to him before he got too close, but Kogami was already putting the book down and looking up.
"Gino?" A smile stretched across his face, highlighting a few faint bruises that Ginoza hadn't seen before. His eyes lit up, in a familiar look that Ginoza knew was meant just for him. "They let you out."
Almost before Ginoza realized it, he was standing beside his husband's bed. He reached a cautious hand out for Kogami, putting his right hand gently over Kogami's left. Kogami didn't always do well with being touched, and that got a lot worse when he was in pain, or stuck in a hospital bed surrounded by loud noises and harsh lights. Still, it was usually okay to hold his hand, and Kogami smiled again as Ginoza curled his fingers around Kogami's palm.
Carefully, he avoided the IVs, rubbing a thumb over Kogami's wrist. "I think they let me out," Ginoza said, trying not to sound as worried as he felt. "They said something about hearings?"
At first he thought the sound coming from Kogami meant that he was choking, and Ginoza let go of his husband's hand in consternation before a look at him revealed that he was laughing.
"Disciplinary hearings?" Kogami asked, making the words drip with sarcasm. "Is that what they said?"
"Y-yes, but-"
Kogami snickered again. "That's bullshit, Gino. Don't worry about those. It means you're off the hook."
Ginoza blinked at him, hardly able to believe that he was standing here, being laughed at by a very much alive Kogami. "How does that mean I'm off the hook, exactly? Isn't there supposed to be some discipline involved?"
"I've been going to my own disciplinary hearings on and off for three years," Kogami said with an amount of pride that Ginoza found vaguely unnerving. "That's what they do when they can't punish you, but they don't want to admit it. It's a fancy way to waste everyone's time."
Ginoza shook his head, deciding to leave the matter of the hearings for a later date. "Well, why can't they punish me? Did you do something, Shinya?"
"Yep," Kogami said.
Relief warred with concern - if Kogami really had done something, then he was probably right, and the hearings were nothing more than a show. But at the same time, half the things Kogami did Ginoza hated, and this could finally be the thing that got Kogami in real trouble.
Then again, if it had really been that bad, wouldn't Kogami at least be handcuffed or something?
"Was it…was it something illegal?" Ginoza asked nervously.
Kogami shrugged. "I'm actually…not totally sure? All I actually did was threaten the higher ups that I was going to actually be honest about the deal they made with me, so all I'm really doing is…telling the truth."
Ginoza was mostly just happy that Kogami had been allowed back in Japan in the first place, regardless of the circumstances, but he had in all honesty always disapproved of the deal they'd had Kogami sign. Not only was it dangerous for Kogami, it was also underhanded and duplicitous, two things Ginoza did not want to associate with the leaders of his country.
Kogami was still looking up at Ginoza, and Ginoza realized that he was the slightest bit nervous. He didn't want Ginoza to disapprove of what he'd done, even though it had obviously been for him.
"Well…," Ginoza said haltingly, "I suppose they were the ones who initiated the deal in the first place."
"So it serves them right, huh?"
"Well, I don't know that I'd go quite that far…."
Kogami grinned. "So Gino the Just finally admits that sometimes blackmail might be okay? Damn, I wish I had recorded that. I never thought I'd see the day, I can't believe I really thought you might be mad…."
All of a sudden, the fear, exhaustion, and stress from the past few weeks caught up with Ginoza. It happened all at once. One second he had been watching Kogami smile and feeling like all was right with the world, and the next second he was shaking like a leaf and trying to swallow against an unexpected lump in his throat.
He had really thought he might never see Kogami again. He had thought he would have to go through the rest of his life without this. The absence of terror didn't even feel like relief yet, just an aching numbness that had him spent completely.
"Hey, hey," Kogami said. He reached a hand up, minding the fluid lines and wires as he did so. He wrapped his arm around Ginoza's waist and tugged him gently closer, resting his head on Ginoza's hip. "It's alright. I'm back. I made it back. And they're not going to throw you in jail or anything. I made sure of that."
"I thought…."
"I know. But it's alright now."
"I…."
"And I promise I will not let that happen again. I keep my promises, right?"
"I brought you cigarettes," Ginoza said. His voice was still trembling, but he wanted desperately to change the subject before he started actually crying in the hospital room. He would never survive the mortification. "They're from your bedside table, so I don't know how old they are. Do cigarettes expire? Oh, I guess you're probably not allowed to smoke in here, are you?"
"Wouldn't anyways," Kogami said promptly. "I told you I'd quit if I made it back, remember? On the phone? Well, here I am."
Ginoza had forgotten all about that. Kogami had been so sick it was a wonder that he hadn't forgotten too. He half-expected Kogami to be joking, but when he looked at his husband, he only saw earnestness there.
Ginoza allowed himself to be pulled a little closer. Now everything would be alright.
